Oral Roberts | Wheaton Oral Roberts John Wimber (Granville) Oral Roberts (1918- 2009), healing evangelist and televangelist, was born in Pontonoc County, Oklahoma, the son of a poor farmer and itinerant preacher in the Pentecostal Holiness denomination. At the age of seventeen Roberts believed he had been miraculously healed of tuberculosis and a speech impediment. At age eighteen he received the baptism of the Holy Spirit and was ordained into the Pentecostal Holiness ministry. By the mid-1940s he was serving as the pastor of a church in Enid, Oklahoma, but left to undertake a full-time healing revival ministry in 1947. Based in Tulsa, Roberts became the most successful of the healing evangelists of the 1950s. He founded his own magazine, Abundant Life, and cobbled together a radio network of over 500 stations. It was in television, however, that Roberts truly found his calling, beginning weekly broadcasts from his crusades in 1955.

Buoyed by the financial gifts of his Pentecostal followers, Roberts was able to maintain and grow his own independent network of television stations which reached every part of the United States. The impact of Roberts’s broadcasts on the burgeoning charismatic movement among mainline Protestants and Catholics in the 1960s cannot be overestimated. Such was his success that by 1965 he was able to open his own four year-liberal arts college, Oral Roberts University (ORU) in Tulsa. 1968 marked a watershed year in Roberts’s career. Sensing the “moving of the Spirit” within mainline denominations, Roberts startled both his friends and foes as he discontinued his crusades and television broadcasts. Giving up his ordination in the Pentecostal Holiness Church, he sought ordination in, and joined, the Methodist Church. In 1969 he vaulted back into television with a series of hour-long, prime-time specials featuring celebrity guests, a variety show format, and a talented musical ensemble all under the seasoned eye of a top-flight Hollywood producer. Over the next decade, these specials attracted comparatively huge audiences for religious television and made Roberts a household name.

Financially they proved a boon and jump-started his vision to expand ORU with a law school and a medical school replete with its own hospital, clinic, and research center–”The City of Faith.” This marked the beginning of a new phase of escalating financial burdens, aggressive fundraising campaigns, and virulent criticism from the medical, legal, and academic establishments. Coming as it did in the midst of media publicity surrounding a growing corpus of financial and sexual misdeeds among other televangelists, Roberts’ ministry and image began to suffer. The subsequent sexual indiscretions of his son and televangelist heir, Richard, only served to further erode Roberts’s image. In the early 1990s Roberts was forced to sell his City of Faith and his law school, although ORU remained as a stable Christian liberal arts college. Overall, the thrust of Roberts’s overall career made a great impact upon the evangelical subculture, raising the image and self-respect of Pentecostals, enabling the spread of the charismatic movement, and leaving a lasting legacy in evangelical media and education.

For further reading see David Edwin Harrell, Jr., Oral Roberts: An American Life (Indiana, 1985), and Oral Roberts, Expect a Miracle: My Life and Ministry (Nelson, 1995). Project MUSE - An Architecture for the Electronic Church: Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Oklahoma An Architecture for the Electronic Church Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Oklahoma Margaret M. Grubiak (bio) ABSTRACT More than a university, Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Oklahoma, was also the headquarters for evangelist Oral Roberts’s electronic church. The electronic church in America, dominated by Christian evangelicals, used technology to spread the Gospel over radio airways and television signals to a dispersed audience. Yet evangelicals like Roberts also constructed ambitious campuses in real space and time. The architecture of Oral Roberts University visualized a modern and “populuxe” image for the electronic church in the 1960s and 1970s. The university’s Prayer Tower purposely alluded to the Seattle Space Needle, aligning religion and the Space Age, and the campus’s white, gold, and black color palette on late modern buildings created an image of aspirational luxury, conveying Roberts’s health and wealth gospel.

Oral Roberts University served as a sound stage for Roberts’s radio and television shows, a pilgrimage point for his audience, and a university dedicated to training evangelicals in the electronic church. For the opening of a 1969 religious television special broadcast live from the campus of Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the camera panned to the Prayer Tower as a voiceover proclaimed it to be “a beacon of a focusing of faith” ( fig. 1 ). After lingering on the eternal flame representing the Holy Spirit at the top of the tower and announcing “a bold and imaginative hour of words and music to live by,” the program cut to an indoor studio located on the campus. There, the announcer introduced the World Action Singers, composed of university students; soloist Richard Roberts, son of Oral; special guest, singer and actress Dale Evans, wife of cowboy entertainer Roy Rogers; and then preacher, healer, and university president Oral Roberts himself as students and faculty applauded in the [End Page 380] audience. 1 Roberts’s Contact television specials including this 1969 broadcast aired on prime-time national television four times a year.

These specials intertwined the word of God with celebrities like Johnny Cash and Jerry Lewis to capture an audience numbering more than 37 million by 1973. 2 Roberts also filmed his weekly Sunday morning television programs on campus. The Oral Roberts University campus, valued at over $150 million in the late 1970s, was, in the words of Roberts’s Hollywood producer, “the world’s most expensive [television] set.” 3 Oral Roberts University served multiple and reinforcing purposes that went well beyond the traditional conception of a university. Its campus was simultaneously a sound stage for Roberts’s radio and television programs, a pilgrimage point for the believers he garnered over the airways, and a place to educate future evangelists in using technological communication to spread God’s word to the world. Click for larger view View full resolution Fig 1. Prayer Tower (center) and John D. Messick Learning Resources Center (left), Oral Roberts University, Tulsa, Oklahoma, ca. 1960s.

(Source: Beryl Ford Collection/Rotary Club of Tulsa, Tulsa City-County Library and Tulsa Historical Society, Tulsa, Oklahoma.) The architecture of Oral Roberts University reified the so-called electronic church in America—the collection of religious radio, television, and now online ministries dominated by Christian evangelicals. While the electronic church ostensibly existed in radio waves and satellite transmissions, radio evangelists and televangelists in the 1960s through the 1980s realized [End Page 381] ambitious architectural programs—including Robert Schuller’s Crystal Cathedral in California, Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker’s Heritage USA theme park in South Carolina, and Pat Robertson’s Regent University in Virginia—that located the electronic church in real space. 4 Oral Roberts University was a particularly successful realization of the electronic church in two principal ways. First, the campus was the site of the very production of Roberts’s electronic ministries, providing interior studio space and exterior stage sets. Second, the architecture of the campus itself symbolized the technological production and transmission of Roberts’s evangelical message. The architectural image that Oral Roberts University employed to make the electronic church real reveled in fantasy.

In 1973, the New York Times called the campus “an educational and spiritual Disneyland” for its world’s fair–like buildings imbued with overt religious imagery. 5 The 200-foot Prayer Tower, described by the university itself as a “twentieth-century cross” with a metal “crown of thorns,” also purposefully alluded to the Seattle Space Needle, trafficking in the architectural language of the Space Age in a frank alignment of technology and religion. 6 The other nearly twenty buildings of the campus constructed in the 1960s and 1970s (the campus is remarkable for few later constructions) were unified in their white, gold, and black palette 7 ( fig. 2 ). The campus architecture evoked a kind of popular luxury that was aspirational and reflective of Roberts’s health and wealth gospel. The architectural press largely ignored the Oral Roberts University campus at the time of its construction, and the campus continues to elude critical inquiry.

While David Edwin Harrell Jr.’s masterful 1985 biography of Oral Roberts—written, importantly, with access to primary sources and archival information—includes a brief history of the campus’s development, the archives of both Oral Roberts and Oral Roberts University are currently closed to scholars, which has stymied attempts to further understand its architectural program. 8 I cannot document Roberts’s original sources and rationale for the university’s architecture, nor that of his architects, first Cecil Stanfield and more substantially Frank Wallace. I propose here instead an analytical framework that contextualizes a campus built as both a university and radio and television studio. The significance of the [End Page 382] Oral Roberts University campus resides not in the originality of its architecture (indeed, architect Wallace drew freely on other sources) but rather what its architecture has to say about the possibility of religion and modernity coexisting and thriving together, an idea that challenges the secularization narrative that contends religion and modernity are at odds. I argue that the architecture of Oral Roberts University created a cogent visual language for the electronic church.

In its futuristic buildings, the campus expressed the optimistic alliance between technology and religion in the modern era; in its opulent image, it realized Oral Roberts’s promise of an abundant life lived with Christ. Click for larger view View full resolution Fig 2. Oral Roberts University campus on dedication day, 2 April 1967. Clockwise from top: Prayer Tower, Learning Resources Center, Timko-Barton Hall, Roberts Hall dormitory, and the dome of the Health and Physical Education Center. (Source: Beryl Ford Collection/Rotary Club of Tulsa, Tulsa City-County Library and Tulsa Historical Society, Tulsa, Oklahoma.) Oral Roberts and the Electronic Church Granville Oral Roberts (1918–2009) was one of the preeminent televangelists in American history. His call to evangelization was rooted in a miraculous experience in rural, Depression-era Oklahoma. In 1935, at the age of seventeen and suffering severely from tuberculosis, Roberts was taken by his brother Elmer to a religious revival in the nearby town of Ada.

[End Page 383] As evangelist George Moncey prayed over Oral in the tent, Roberts felt “the healing power of the Lord” as something “like electricity” went through his body. 9 In that moment, Roberts believed he was healed from both his tuberculosis and his stutter. The son of a Pentecostal preacher, he felt called to his own ministry first as a preacher for the Pentecostal Holiness Church (which had historic ties to the Methodist Church), then as a popular itinerant faith healer conducting tent crusades, and ultimately as a Methodist televangelist with national and world notoriety. In each phase of his ministry, the power of prayer and the Holy Spirit remained fundamental to Roberts. Roberts came of age in the midst of an ascendant evangelical revival in the postwar era that drew large audiences in live religious crusades and over radio and television broadcasts. 10 Billy Graham’s 1949 Los Angeles crusade, visited by 350,000 people over eight weeks, announced evangelical Christianity’s entrance onto the national stage. Yet within the evangelical movement there were distinct differences in theologies and personalities.

Ordained as a Southern Baptist in North Carolina, Graham—called by Roberts the “number one” evangelist to Roberts’s self-declared secondary status—emerged as the popular and respected face of evangelism. 11 Graham sought consensus among Christian denominations and employed a moderate, inclusive message focused on the opportunity to be born again in Christ. 12 Jerry Falwell, a Southern Baptist preacher who televised The Old-Time Gospel Hour from his church in Lynchburg, Virginia, advocated a harder, fundamentalist line in the fire-and-brimstone tradition. With the creation of the Moral Majority in 1979 and other Christian Right initiatives, Falwell engaged directly in American political life in ways that Roberts did not. 13 While Graham, Falwell, and other well-known Protestant evangelists in this period focused on the divine word, Roberts focused on divine healing. As one of the gifts of the Holy Spirit central to Pentecostal theology (including also prophecy and speaking in tongues), divine healing was subject to widespread skepticism. Roberts spent much of his life in a long-term public relations campaign to overcome his reputation as a suspect faith healer.

The evangelical movement coincided with a golden era of broadcast communication; the two together gave rise to the electronic church in the United States. Quentin Schultze identifies the “mythos of the electronic church” as being “grounded in the idea of Christian progress” and “grafted [End Page 384] to American optimism about technology.” 14 As theologian Joseph Kim argues, evangelicals saw “technology as God’s providential gift to the church for the accomplishment of its mission.” 15 Technology made possible a new and alternative model for religion, one dislocated from physical place, whose admission was through the radio speaker and television screen. The electronic church in the United States began with religious radio broadcasts in the 1920s and grew to include religious television programming in the 1950s. By the 1970s and 1980s, the electronic church became specifically associated with American Protestants, particularly evangelicals and Pentecostals.

Marred by financial and sexual scandals, the electronic church in America also gained criticism for failing to effectively convert people to Christianity, presenting a dumbed-down theology for easy sound bites, and substituting a serious study of the Bible with entertainment. Martin Marty called the electronic church the “invisible religion,” where people could worship in private without having to engage physically in the congregation of worshippers—the traditional meaning of “church” and the cornerstone of community membership. 16 In spite of these challenges, the electronic church has played a large and persistent role in American mass media and popular culture. 17 Oral Roberts’s ministry participated in the electronic church both in radio and television formats at an early stage. By the early 1950s, his half-hour daily religious radio programs were heard on 300 to 500 stations in North America, including the American Broadcasting Company’s network, and 40 international stations by the 1960s. 18 Quickly, however, Roberts’s television ministry, begun in 1954, eclipsed his radio ministry.

In 1959, the Roberts ministry quantified “souls won” in the past year by its electronic outreach efforts: 364,228 by radio compared to 532,880 by television. 19 The radio programs—which included listener testimonials, a short sermon by Roberts, and Roberts’s healing prayer—paled in comparison to the vividness of his televised tent revivals filmed in the mid- to late 1950s. The camera more faithfully conveyed Roberts’s charismatic persona, and he thrived on the interaction with an audience at times reaching [End Page 385] 15,000 people. These early black-and-white broadcasts featured Roberts’s sermons and the altar call for those wanting to accept Christ in their lives, but the most anticipated moment was the famed prayer line, where Roberts would lay his right hand on people and pray for God’s healing ( fig. 3 ). The ability to actually see Roberts’s physical touch in prayer generated belief in ways more powerful than radio could provide. 20 Click for larger view View full resolution Fig 3. Granville Oral Roberts, laying on hands at a crusade in Salem, Oregon, 1963.

(Source: Beryl Ford Collection/Rotary Club of Tulsa, Tulsa City-County Library and Tulsa Historical Society, Tulsa, Oklahoma.) As successful as these early television programs were, Roberts understood that they did not take full advantage of the possibilities of television to reach the vast audiences who needed salvation. In the 1960s, he discarded the conventional tent revival in favor of a brand new format that fused Hollywood and religion and trod the line between secular and religious content. He created entertainment-driven, full-color programs filmed in a studio with stage sets and a live studio audience. Critics argued that the celebrities, entertainers, music, and choreography that created a lively and popular program—one of his specials even received Emmy nominations for art direction and production—crowded out Roberts’s own religious preaching, a point Roberts acknowledged but defended as strategy. He first needed to produce shows that the networks would broadcast, [End Page 386] and once he had proven the success of these shows he then devoted more time to his religious message.

21 Roberts’s frank use of Hollywood tactics strongly recalled those of Aimee Semple McPherson in 1920s Los Angeles, another Pentecostal evangelist well known for her sermons illustrated with props such as motorcycles and live animals. As Matthew Avery Sutton claimed, “McPherson found no contradiction between her rejection of Hollywood values and her use of show business techniques.” 22 Oral Roberts, too, made use of entertainment and theatricality in the service of saving souls, especially those of a younger generation. Roberts’s entertainment-heavy format transformed televangelism. Harrell identifies the revamped Oral Roberts television programs of the late 1960s and early 1970s that infused religious broadcasts with entertainment and celebrity as the invention of the modern electronic church. 23 Importantly, these specials were televised in prime time to escape the “Sunday morning ghetto” of religious programming and to bring religion to a realm that had previously been reserved for secular entertainment. While very expensive to produce and air, Roberts’s television programs were quickly supported by mailed-in funds from viewers. Their popularity increased Roberts’s national notoriety and created dividends for other parts of his ministry.

Roberts did not push inventions in broadcast technology itself—he bought airtime on existing networks, in contrast, for example, to Jim Bakker and Pat Robertson, who created the PTL (Praise the Lord) Television Network and Christian Broadcasting Network, respectively—but what he did do was pioneer the most popular format of televangelism and become one of its most prominent figures. Oral Roberts University: Headquarters of Oral Roberts’s Electronic Church When Roberts established his eponymous university in 1963 and opened its doors in 1965, it was more than a university—it was the physical realization and headquarters of Roberts’s electronic church. He established the university just as he was scaling back his traveling crusades. As one account put it, Roberts’s “traveling crusade tent has been folded away in favor of the television sound stage.” 24 That television sound stage was the university, conceived as another facet of Roberts’s ministry. Roberts himself explained that “Oral Roberts University comes from, is a part of, and continues to grow from ministry roots.” 25 The creation of an entirely [End Page 387] new university was an audacious and financially risky undertaking.

Roberts employed a “pay-as-you-go” approach to constructing the campus, raising money—early loans and large donations—from his “prayer partners” and from the Oral Roberts Evangelistic Association. 26 The founding of the university was part of his larger move toward mainstream legitimization, including his acceptance into the Methodist Church in 1968. 27 Oral Roberts University appealed to academic tradition and conventional hallmarks in order to establish itself as a mainstream institution. It was a point of pride how quickly the university received its accreditation in 1971. In choosing the motto “Educating the Whole Man” (now “Person”)—meaning wholeness in mind, body, and spirit, as the university seal recounts—it aligned itself with a longstanding tradition of teaching the whole student, stemming from the perceived ideals of Oxford and Cambridge Universities in England. Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and other universities had embraced the same pedagogical notion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. 28 In further signposts of legitimacy, Oral Roberts University advertised that half of its professors held a Ph.D.

29 Understanding athletics “as a means of witnessing about our faith,” the university also established a basketball team to gain national name recognition and to engender loyalty and fandom. 30 Even as it positioned itself within traditional academic ideals, the school identified strongly as a conservative Christian university with a central evangelical mission. Roberts was inspired to establish the university by his own son’s secularized experience at Stanford University. 31 Evangelist Billy Graham framed the genesis of the university this way: While many American colleges and universities had become places where “religion and God are foreign,” “[w]e see rising up in this country schools like Oral Roberts University and men like Oral Roberts, who are not ashamed to say ‘I believe in the Bible, in Christ, and in the supernatural.’” 32 The university required attendance at chapel twice weekly, though students could attend local churches of their choice and denomination on Sundays. Students also had to adhere to strict conduct and dress codes as well as physical fitness standards. 33 The school was distinctive for how strongly it was tied to its religious founder and namesake.

President Roberts—who himself never [End Page 388] earned a college degree—was a constant presence on campus and exerted control over students and faculty in a “semitheocracy.” 34 Click for larger view View full resolution Fig 4. Oral Roberts University Mabee Center (right) and the “Baby Mabee” broadcast center (left). The City of Faith central tower is visible at center left. (Photograph by Margaret M. Grubiak.) The campus served as the interior and exterior stage for Roberts’s electronic church. In his reworked television programs of the 1960s, he filmed the first ones on the campus in 1969, then moved production to Hollywood, and in 1973 moved production back to the campus where Roberts felt more comfortable performing in front of a familiar audience often composed of university members. 35 Roberts initially filmed these Contact quarterly television specials and his weekly Sunday programs in the campus’s multipurpose auditorium, the Mabee Center (1970–72) ( fig. 4 ). The exterior of this elliptical-shaped building with its wide gold cornice, dark glass, and white vertical supports played on the imagery of a revival tent.

In the late 1970s, an addition called the Baby Mabee—the Mabee Center’s architectural miniature—was constructed to hold a sophisticated television studio with state-of-the-art equipment, including a color camera named Evelyn II after Roberts’s wife (see figure 4 ). 36 Dick Ross, the Hollywood [End Page 389] producer who orchestrated the Oral Roberts specials, characterized the facilities as “the finest equipped television stage between New York and the West Coast.” 37 While the interiors of the Mabee Center and Baby Mabee were the primary settings for Roberts’s television programs, the larger campus also played an important role in the visualization of Roberts’s electronic church. In addition to the 1969 program that opened with views toward the university’s Prayer Tower and Learning Resources Center, a 1974 special introducing the home states of the World Action Singers placed the singers against exterior views of university dorms, the student center, and the Prayer Tower. 38 While it is unknown how often the campus appeared on Roberts’s television programs, its use as a backdrop explicitly tied the campus to the Roberts ministry and provided key publicity for the university.

As Harrell reported, within one year of Roberts’s televised specials beginning in 1969, interest by prospective students wishing to enroll doubled. 39 The Prayer Tower was a microcosm of Roberts’s ministry, including his electronic outreach. Students and visitors reached the entrance at the base of the tower through lush sunken gardens, recalling a Garden of Eden seemingly out of place in the harsh Oklahoma climate. Inside, visitors found exhibits on the ground floor explaining the “whole person” mission of the university overlaid on an image of the world map. 40 Roberts also had displayed a simple and well-worn folded chair he used in his tent revivals as a historic artifact or even religious relic. 41 The lower level housed prayer rooms, available to all. For views of the Oklahoma landscape, visitors could ride the elevator up 100 feet to the observation level, which included Roberts’s own private prayer room.

In his ambitious fund drive for the City of Faith medical complex (1977–81) constructed adjacent to the university campus, Roberts stayed in this prayer room until $8 million was raised, claiming that failure would mean the “Lord would call him home.” 42 The ultimate success of that fund drive served as more evidence of the power of prayer. Also located on this level were the offices of the Abundant Life Prayer Group’s 24-hour prayer line, the electronic version of the famed prayer line in Roberts’s tent revivals. The prayer group received phone calls from people around the world wanting to talk, pray, and receive counseling. During these calls, people were able to have a personal experience with a “prayer partner,” a surrogate for the laying on of hands by Oral Roberts himself ( fig. 5 ). The prayer line, which received nearly half-a-million calls [End Page 390] annually by 1977, spoke to the worldwide outreach of the Roberts ministry made possible through electronic communication. 43 Click for larger view View full resolution Fig 5. A “prayer partner” speaking with a caller in the Abundant Life Prayer Group headquarters in the Prayer Tower.

(Source: Perihelion (yearbook), 1967, 203. Image courtesy of Tulsa City-County Library, Tulsa, Oklahoma; used with permission from Oral Roberts University.) The university’s non-profit KORU radio station was also on the Prayer Tower’s observation level 44 ( fig. 6 ). While Roberts’s radio shows were distributed nationally and internationally by a network of radio stations, KORU served a regional area of Oklahoma, Kansas, Arkansas, and Texas. The station broadcast Roberts’s Sunday half-hour radio program, but it also filled its more than twelve hours of daily airtime with a mixture of classical, contemporary, and religious music along with some talk shows in an effort to evangelize in a different way. The target audience was “the non-Christian public.” As the station manager said in 1969, “Christian radio needs to stop being broadcast only to the three or four per cent of the public [End Page 391] who want strictly religious programming.

… You can have the world’s greatest message, but if nobody hears it—if you can’t get anybody to listen to it … so what?” The station included short “fish hook” spots focusing on life’s meaning with a call to consider the role of Christ and God. This kind of “subliminal broadcasting” sought to “slip past the conscious mind and lodge persuasion in the subconscious.” 45 This fusion of secular and religious programming echoed the approach of Roberts’s television programs of the late 1960s and the 1970s. In its inclusion of the KORU radio station, the Prayer Tower further located the production and distribution of Roberts’s electronic message in real space and time. Click for larger view View full resolution Fig 6. Interior of KORU radio station headquarters in the Prayer Tower. (Source: Perihelion (yearbook), 1967, 48. Image courtesy of Tulsa City-County Library, Tulsa, Oklahoma; used with permission from Oral Roberts University.) The focus on electronic media such as those located in the Mabee Center, [End Page 392] Baby Mabee, and the Prayer Tower pervaded the university as a whole.

A primary selling point for the school in its promotional literature was its advanced electronic capabilities. The Learning Resources Center, which was on axis with the Prayer Tower, boasted a powerful “dial-a-lesson” computer called the Dial Access Information Retrieval System that allowed professors to record video lectures and students to view these lectures at any time, including when streamed into their dorm rooms on provided televisions. This early “electronic textbook,” also advertised as “homework via television,” enabled students to learn introductory concepts so professors could go into greater depth during class time. 46 The library itself was framed as an “electronic library,” and it also hosted television production studios. 47 The New York Times described the campus as having “probably the most sophisticated technology of any liberal-arts college in the country.” 48 Technology was viewed as an integral aspect of education, just as it was seen as essential to the overall ministry of Oral Roberts. Students were also expected to participate in the electronic church. The World Action Singers who performed on the Roberts television ministry were selected from university students in an attempt to appeal to a younger audience. Students and faculty were also invited to be the audience for Roberts’s television shows.

Students gained experience with technology in the service of evangelization by working at the KORU radio station, and this technological teaching was also codified in the curriculum. Roberts’s University of Evangelism, the predecessor to Oral Roberts University, trained students in the use of “radio, television, films and other modern methods to win souls”; one of the courses offered at Oral Roberts University was “Contemporary Methods in Evangelization.” 49 A key purpose of the university was to train future evangelists for the electronic church. The university’s focus on technology identified it as a technologically progressive and forward-looking institution. In its own promotional literature, it used the descriptors “futuristic” and “ultramodern,” advertising that every dorm room had a television and air conditioning and that the student dining commons had state-of-the-art microwave ovens. 50 Amid the university dedication events in 1967, Billy Graham stressed the electronic leaning of the university: “Dr. Roberts has given Tulsa and America a university and an institution of and for tomorrow.

He has taken all that modern science can give, including computers and electronics and used [End Page 393] them in the best way to mold students.” 51 While an operating, degree-granting institution, Oral Roberts University was, and remains, heavily invested in the modern electronic church. Architecture for the Electronic Church The power of the electronic church resided in its ability to transcend space and time to reach millions of potential believers through the airwaves. Even though these consumers of the electronic church may have felt a personal connection with radio preachers and televangelists whose voices they heard and whose visages they saw, the very nature of the electronic church dislocated its believers from real space and real presence. The most immediate point of contact was the radio or television set itself. Art historian David Morgan recounts that Oral Roberts “asked his listeners to place their hands on their radio sets as they listened from afar in their parlours to pray with him and receive a special blessing which he sent by touching the microphone through which he broadcast his sermon.” 52 Roberts would also ask his believers to touch their television sets as a way to emulate a personal connection.

53 Given that the desire for the in-person encounter between preacher and believer persisted, architecture provided a means to locate the electronic church in real space and enable a distant and dispersed church body to visualize a house of worship. It also offered a permanent locus for pilgrimage. Oral Roberts University was not the first to establish an architecture for the electronic church; it had important predecessors. The early radio church of the 1920s had two remarkable architectural realizations: Aimee Semple McPherson’s Angelus Temple in Los Angeles and Father Charles Coughlin’s Shrine of the Little Flower church near Detroit. McPherson, considered a key founder of modern Pentecostalism, grew her International Church of the Foursquare Gospel as a powerful female evangelist who gained followers through her tent revivals and radio broadcasts on her own KSFG radio station, with a reach extending to Canada, Hawaii, and Mexico. 54 Through a successful fundraising campaign, McPherson was able to build the 5,300-seat Angelus Temple (1923), a white, domed auditorium that played on the visual language of theater—fitting the nature of her dramatic services—with its marquee-like signage and interior stage.

The building also directly communicated McPherson’s radio ministry: atop the temple’s dome rose two tall metal radio towers, an [End Page 394] electronic substitute for traditional steeples 55 ( fig. 7 ). The red radio call letters and moniker “Angelus” later added to the towers, as well as a red cross on the dome’s roof, were illuminated to be visible in the night sky. McPherson later constructed a school, the Angelus Temple Evangelistic and Missionary Training Institute, next to the temple, as well as a 24-hour prayer tower, anticipating Oral Roberts’s own university and prayer tower. Click for larger view View full resolution Fig 7. A 1936 view of Aimee Semple McPherson’s Angelus Temple (1923) in Los Angeles, showing the KFSG radio towers. (Source: Photograph by Burton O. Burt, Los Angeles Public Library Photo Collection, Los Angeles Public Library.) Like McPherson’s Angelus Temple, Father Charles Coughlin’s Shrine of the Little Flower also fused a real place of worship with a locus of electronic religious broadcasting.

Funds from Coughlin’s Roman Catholic radio program, begun in 1926 and attracting as many as thirty million listeners, helped the construction of the church outside Detroit in 1931. The octagonal art deco church included a tower carved with a crucifix out of which Coughlin recorded his broadcasts. 56 Towers have a long, deep history in ecclesiastical architecture—they are a key architectural component for visibility and the aural experience of ringing bells. Yet the notion that towers, in both the traditional form of the Little Flower church and the unconventional form of McPherson’s broadcast towers, became the locus [End Page 395] of radio broadcasts in the early years of the electronic church marks a novel irruption of the technological age into sacred space. Click for larger view Fig 8. Rex Humbard’s Cathedral of Tomorrow, Akron, Ohio, 1958. (Source: Personal collection of Margaret M. Grubiak.) When television emerged as the new medium through which to save souls, evangelist Rex Humbard, a friend of Oral Roberts, constructed the Cathedral of Tomorrow in Akron, Ohio, in 1958 with the purpose of producing and broadcasting televised religious services.

After seeing one of the first-ever television broadcasts, Humbard wrote in his memoir, “I was impressed with the power and magnitude of this new invention, television, as it reached those of us gathered in front of that window. … At that moment, God placed upon my heart a burden to build a church known as the Cathedral of Tomorrow.” 57 In designing the church, Humbard created a huge domed auditorium with a seating capacity of 5,400 and a revolving stage ( fig. 8 ). The Cathedral of Tomorrow’s size and purpose presaged the later American megachurch, which relies heavily on technology to convey its message. 58 A more complex relationship between technology, architecture, and the experience of the electronic church played out in the drive-in church designed in 1961 by Richard Neutra for Rev. Robert Schuller’s Garden Grove Community Church in Southern California ( fig. 9 ). Schuller became a major American televangelist famous for his Hour of Power Sunday [End Page 396] Click for larger view View full resolution Fig 9. Garden Grove Community Church, architect Richard Neutra, Garden Grove, California, 1961.

(Source: Photograph by Julius Shulman, 1963; ©J. Paul Getty Trust, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles [2004.R.10].) broadcasts. For Schuller, architecture orchestrated the auditory and visual spectacle of the service. Neutra designed a walk-in and drive-in church that could accommodate those who wished for the traditional experience of a church and those who wished to experience it from the privacy and convenience of their cars. In the glazed, rectangular structure of the church, Neutra oriented the pews conventionally toward an elevated stage and pulpit, reached by a tall staircase, for Reverend Schuller and the choir. The church’s glass walls allowed those in parked cars surrounding the building to gaze into the church as if it were a kind of movie screen while they listened to Schuller’s sermons through individual speakers. In a dramatic touch, Neutra designed the eastern glass elevation as a series of large windows that could be pulled back to open the nave to an outside terrace, in effect dissolving the screen so that Schuller could connect with the crowd in the “pews of Detroit” more directly.

59 This multi-modal architecture aligned religion with the popular culture of drive-in theaters and cars. It also trafficked in an electronic understanding—both aurally and visually—of church participation. Schuller further exploited this experience of church in his later Crystal Cathedral (1977–80) by architect Philip Johnson, [End Page 397] which was the centerpiece of Schuller’s televangelist empire on the same campus as the drive-in church. The radio tower church, television studio church, and drive-in church began the visualization of the electronic church. When Roberts laid out his plans for a university in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in the 1960s, he envisioned a space for an evangelical mission unapologetically dependent on technological communication. First employing architect Cecil Stanfield and then architect Frank Wallace, Roberts crafted a cohesive vision of the electronic church, the centerpiece of which was both literally and metaphorically the Prayer Tower. Prayer Tower and Space Needle The iconic structure of Oral Roberts University is the 200-foot Prayer Tower (1966–67), what Roberts called “the logo for the university” 60 ( fig. 10 ).

Designed by Wallace, the tower reminded students, visitors, and Roberts’s television audience alike “that prayer and the power of God are central to all we do” within Roberts’s ministry and the university. 61 Its embedded symbolism worked toward this reminder. The Prayer Tower was constructed on a spiraling steel frame, meant to realize the spiritual journey and ascent. From afar, the tower’s form looked like a cross. Up close, those looking up at the tower saw a symmetrical web of steel that was to recall Jesus’s crown of thorns. To stress this analogy, the tips of steel in the crown were colored red to symbolize the blood of Christ. From above, this crown of thorns also appeared as the Star of David. At the very top of the tower was an eternal flame, representing the Holy Spirit. Furthering the assertion of religion on the campus, a carillon on the Prayer Tower played hymns three times a day. In these visual and auditory cues, the Prayer Tower asserted Christ in the daily experience of the campus and presented the mission of the Roberts ministry visually and explicitly. In addition to this overt religious symbolism, the Prayer Tower also trafficked in Space Age symbolism to create a futuristic vision for evangelical religion.

The New York Times described the campus, including its Prayer Tower, as “right out of ‘2001,’” a reference to Stanley Kubrick’s landmark 1968 film, 2001: A Space Odyssey. 62 In 1978, architect Peter Papademetriou in the journal Progressive Architecture—one of the few articles to critically examine Oral Roberts University’s architecture—linked the school’s architecture to the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair. Referencing architect Minoru Yamasaki, who had designed the popular U.S. Science Pavilion for the Seattle fair, and Oscar Niemeyer, architect of Brazil’s modernist capital Brasilia from the 1950s, Papademetriou described the Oral [End Page 398] Roberts University campus “looking as if it crystallizes the dream of a Yamasaki designing Brasilia after he had seen the Seattle World’s Fair.” 63 Click for larger view Fig 10. Prayer Tower, Oral Roberts University, architect Frank Wallace, 1966–67. (Source: Photograph by Margaret M.

Grubiak.) Papademetriou’s comparison of Oral Roberts University’s architecture to the Seattle World’s Fair was particularly on point. In May 1963, less than seven months after the fair closed, Roberts conducted a crusade on the Seattle fairgrounds. 64 During this visit, he would have seen the Space Needle and walked around the grounds, perhaps visiting the U.S. Science Pavilion science exhibition buildings designed by Yamasaki (now called the Pacific Science Center) ( figs. 11 and 12 ). Roberts was immersed in this environment just as he was thinking through the plans for his own university, then under construction. His experience at Seattle is significant because he had an active role in directing the design of the Oral Roberts University campus. As architect Wallace recounted, Roberts talked twice a [End Page 399] Click for larger view View full resolution Fig 12. View of the Century 21 Exposition, Seattle, Washington, 1962, with the U.S. Science Pavilion by architect Minoru Yamasaki, and the Christian Witness Pavilion (right). (Source: Photograph by Max R. Jensen, published by C. P. Johnston Co.; personal collection of Margaret M.

Grubiak.) [End Page 400] week with Wallace when Roberts was in Tulsa. 65 The forward-looking architecture Roberts observed in Seattle would ultimately be reflected in his campus in Tulsa. The Prayer Tower in Tulsa parroted the Space Needle and U.S. Science Pavilion in Seattle in its designs. In 1962, when Stanfield was the architect for the campus, Oral Roberts University published a campus master plan with a central structure in a triangular, sail-like shape. 66 The design changed dramatically after Roberts visited Seattle in 1963 and changed his architect to Wallace. In a second scheme published in 1964, Wallace transformed the central structure, now named the Prayer Tower, into an open cylinder with lancet arches and an open crown 67 ( fig. 13 ). This design borrowed much formal language from Yamasaki’s so-called “space Gothic” arches on the Seattle fairgrounds. The final design of the Prayer Tower, constructed in 1967, more directly referenced the Seattle Space Needle. The Space Needle itself has its own source in a radio and television tower in Stuttgart, Germany, notable for its rotating restaurant.

One of the Seattle fair organizers who had visited the Stuttgart tower suggested that the fair have a similar structure with a similar rotating feature. Architect John Graham Jr. crafted a 608-foot structure elegant in shape: a tripod-like supporting structure pinched near the top supporting a gleaming round saucer holding a rotating restaurant (see figure 11 ). 68 The Space Needle did not have radio or television broadcasting capabilities, but during the world’s fair it did host a carillon, which the Prayer Tower emulated. From afar, the effect of the Space Needle evoked Space Age imagery in its metallic materials and soaring form. While not a literal copy, the Oral Roberts University Prayer Tower trafficked in the same futuristic language as the Space Needle. Its mirrored gold, blue, and white surfaces gleamed in the Tulsa landscape (see figure 10 ). Although a third of the height of the Space Needle and with a different supporting structure, the Prayer Tower also showcased a saucer-like observation level that compared closely to the Space Needle.

In the press, the Prayer Tower was described as “a space needle” with the nearby dome of the university’s Health and Physical Education Center “resembling a giant flying saucer that has just landed.” 69 The Oral Roberts University campus also mimicked the Seattle World’s [End Page 401] Fair in its broader alignment of religious and technological ideals. The world’s fair was originally conceived as a regional event, a “Festival of the West” intended to revitalize downtown Seattle, but it evolved into “America’s Space Age Fair,” known officially as the “Century 21 Exposition.” Spurring the change in focus was the launching of Russia’s Sputnik 1 in 1957 while the fair was in the planning stages, attracting the involvement of the federal government. By the time the fair opened in 1962, the focus shifted away from cold war propaganda to popularizing science to a public wary of the technologies and weapons science had produced. 70 The federally sponsored U.S. Science Pavilion, the most popular exhibit of the fair, framed science as an avenue for an optimistic future and a tool compatible with traditional values like the arts and religion.

The fair’s Space Needle, with its metallic materials and soaring form, became an icon of the Space Age. Click for larger view View full resolution Fig 13. Successive schemes for the Oral Roberts University Prayer Tower by architects Cecil Stanfield (left) and Frank Wallace (center and right). (Source: “The Way We Weren’t,” Perihelion (yearbook), 1967, 86. Image courtesy of Tulsa City-County Library, Tulsa, Oklahoma; used with permission from Oral Roberts University.) Religion stood prominently alongside science in the imagined Century 21. Three pavilions on the fairgrounds hosted religious themes: the Christian Witness Pavilion; the Sermons from Science exhibit; and the Christian Science Pavilion. Christian Witness housed Christian exhibits and a chapel, and screened a Christian film. Sermons from Science showcased films produced by the Moody Institute of Science, an evangelical Christian group that stressed the compatibility of religion and science. In addition to the religious exhibits themselves, the fair hosted religious-focused events, including Bible Week, Liturgical Week, and a visit by Billy Graham.

71 The fair was an opportunity for evangelization, especially as [End Page 402] only a reported 30 percent of residents in the Northwest belonged to a church, and for imagining the twenty-first century with God very much present. 72 Significantly, the fair organizers placed the Christian Witness Pavilion immediately next to the U.S. Science Pavilion (see figure 12 ). The Christian Witness group stated that the building was to be “a witness in its very location that God’s image, and that of Jesus Christ, stands before man’s technological and scientific achievements.” 73 The “spiritual-industrial complex,” named by Jonathan Herzog and evident in the Seattle fair, harnessed religion to imbue the cold war with higher ideals and aims. 74 Billy Graham, historian Andrew Preston claimed, “explicitly linked the cause of Christ with the cause of America, of Christianity’s struggle against Satan with America’s struggle against communism,” an example of how evangelists framed religion’s role within the cold war. 75 This Christian struggle was also linked directly to America’s space race efforts. David Noble noted that U.S.

astronauts identified publically as “devout Protestants” to counter Soviet “godless communism.” 76 At the Seattle fair, as historian John Findlay has argued, the terms in which science and space were portrayed “had taken on a less earthly and more religious significance” in a fair imbued with religious imagery and language. 77 “At the Seattle World’s Fair,” Findlay reasoned, “science did not so much supplant religion as people’s preferred faith as supplement it by offering a new means to achieve traditional Judeo-Christian ends.” 78 The architecture of the fair, particularly Yamasaki’s U.S. Science Pavilion, imaged this comingling of science and religion. Strikingly, in the middle of the Science Pavilion structures, Yamasaki designed five white, freestanding towers formed from pointed, “space Gothic” arches (see figure 12 ). Fairgoers understood this religious imagery, including one critic who described Yamasaki’s buildings as possessing a “religious” character. 79 This fusion of religion and the Space Age era inspired Oral Roberts in the shaping of his university.

In a final example of his imitation of the Seattle fair, Roberts shaped his university campus as his own version of a world’s fair, one with an even more explicit religious message. As a locus of evangelization, the Oral Roberts University campus drew visitors from around the world. The carefully ordered grounds of the campus—the lavish sunken gardens, the inscribed geometries, and the unified buildings radiating out from the Prayer Tower—read not just as a college campus but also as fairgrounds. (Not coincidentally, Tulsa is also home to the annual Tulsa State Fair first opened in [End Page 403] 1961, one of two state fairs in Oklahoma located less than ten miles from Oral Roberts University.) The colorful Prayer Tower, offering rides to an observation deck much like the Space Needle and Philip Johnson’s New York State Pavilion for the 1964 New York World’s Fair, was an amusement-like attraction.

The Avenue of Flags at the campus entrance showcasing the countries of Oral Roberts University students added to the sense of a fair, further increased by the addition of a giant, 60-foot-tall Praying Hands statue originally commissioned for the City of Faith complex in 1980 and moved to the campus entrance ten years later. These allusions to world’s fairs and amusement parks prompted the descriptions of the campus as a “spiritual Disneyland” and “Six Flags over Jesus.” 80 In 1978, Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker more literally constructed an evangelical campus as fairgrounds and amusement park in their Heritage USA theme park in Fort Mill, South Carolina. The Bakkers’ Heritage USA included a water park, its own version of Disneyland’s Main Street, hotel and conference facilities, an evangelical school, and studios for their PTL satellite network. The visual language of world’s fairs, amusement parks, and the Space Age was enticing for an electronic church deeply engaged in American popular culture and mass media.

The “Populuxe” Oral Roberts University Campus A profile of architect Frank Wallace recounted a story about visitors on the Oral Roberts University campus tour who, when asked who the architect of the campus was, guessed architects Yamasaki and I.M. Pei. Their answers were revealing for two reasons. First, Wallace was not a household name, and he remains little known or studied. Like Oral Roberts, he was an Oklahoma native. He attended architecture school at the University of Arkansas, the same school where Edward Durell Stone—remembered for his designs for the John F. Kennedy Center (1959–71) in Washington, D.C., and the U.S. Embassy (1954) in New Delhi, India, among others—also studied and taught. Rather than seek an elite architect with a national reputation, Roberts consciously chose an architect from his own community to execute his vision. The Oral Roberts University campus was the greatest architectural commission of Wallace’s career. 81 Second, the visitors’ guess of Yamasaki and Pei also revealed just how derivative Wallace’s architecture was.

Wallace, who counted Yamasaki and Frank Lloyd Wright among his architectural heroes, crafted an image for Oral Roberts University that echoed the work of Yamasaki, Wright, Stone, Eero Saarinen, and other architects working in the 1950s and 1960s. 82 This [End Page 404] softened version of modernism eschewed the stark modernist box in favor of graceful lines and luxurious aesthetic. This style appealed to a wider audience, and it became a symbol of good taste for its time. Cultural historian Thomas Hine has named this mid-century style “populuxe.” The populuxe Oral Roberts University campus presented a luxurious, aspirational image that embodied Roberts’s belief that Christ wants his followers to have material as well as spiritual wealth. The populuxe style of the university was signaled in earlier buildings by Roberts’s first architect, Cecil Stanfield. Born in Oklahoma, Stanfield earned his architecture degree from Oklahoma State University and became president of the firm Stanfield, Elliott and Associates in Tulsa. Like Wallace, Stanfield received his most important architectural commissions from Oral Roberts.

Roberts commissioned Stanfield to design the Abundant Life Building (1957–59) near downtown Tulsa, which served as headquarters for the Roberts ministry before the construction of the university. The box-like Abundant Life Building was lavish in its white marble cladding, textured walls, gold accents, and dramatic lighting, including a spotlight on Roberts’s office chair because, according to Stanfield, “Roberts feels he should be at the center of interest here.” 83 Stanfield also designed the first buildings, including what is now named Timko-Barton Hall (1962–64), on what became the Oral Roberts University campus (see figure 2 ). When Roberts replaced Stanfield with architect Frank Wallace, Wallace continued in the style Stanfield established while playing with more diverse forms and more explicit references to Roberts’s Pentecostal theology. A palette of white, gold, and black (only the Prayer Tower had more color) unified the buildings while mirrored glass, honeycomb brise soleil screens, and concrete-blasted panels provided textural interest. Many of the buildings, which Wallace designed “without fronts or backs,” followed triangular shapes both for architectural dynamism and for religious symbolism.

84 The triangular structures of the 3,500-seat Christ’s Chapel (1971–73) monumentalized Roberts’s tent revival structures, symbolized “praying hands,” and made present the Holy Trinity, as a stylized gold dove on the chapel’s foyer ceiling represented the descent of the Holy Spirit ( fig. 14 ). The triangular-shaped Learning Resources Center (1964)—whose graceful white colonnade, recalling the work of Yamasaki and Stone, screened black concrete panels arranged in a three-dimensional chevron pattern—evoked the Holy Trinity while its twelve-notched fountain referenced the twelve apostles 85 ( fig. 15 ). [End Page 405] Click for larger view View full resolution Fig 15. Detail of the John D. Messick Learning Resources Center, Oral Roberts University, architect Frank Wallace, 1964–65. (Source: Photograph by Magaret M. Grubiak.) [End Page 406] View full resolution Fig 16.

Hamill Student Center (1968–69), with view of the Quad Towers dormitories (1972) to right and left, Oral Roberts University, architect Frank Wallace. (Source: Photograph by Margaret M. Grubiak.) Elsewhere, Wallace contrasted quirky angularity, as in the harsh forms of the Hamill Student Center (1968–69), with softened elliptical and circular forms of the Mabee Center and Quad Towers dormitories (1972) ( fig. 16 ). In the form and siting of the buildings, Wallace constructed a dynamic, active architecture. The buildings’ religious symbolism, including the crown of thorns on the Prayer Tower, visualized the mission of the university and its identity as an extension of Roberts’s ministry. Wallace’s designs for Oral Roberts University were rife with references to iconic forms in contemporary American and collegiate architecture. The gold, geodesic-domed Howard Auditorium (1972) echoed the dome of Eero Saarinen’s Kresge Auditorium (1955) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, even if structurally they were not the same ( fig. 17 ).

The triangular forms of Christ’s Chapel evoked Wright’s Taliesin West (begun 1937) in Scottsdale, Arizona, and Walter Netsch’s U.S. Air Force Academy Cadet Chapel (1959–62) in Colorado Springs. As a cohesive scheme, the Oral Roberts University campus recalled another Methodist-affiliated institution, Wright’s Florida Southern College (1941–58) in Lakeland, as well as Stone’s State University of New York at Albany (1961–64), especially with its carillon tower at the center of campus. These architectural references were most likely the result of visits to “other leading universities throughout the world” made by Wallace along with head of construction Bill Roberts and Dean of Academics John D. Messick as the [End Page 407] university was being formed, although it is unclear exactly which institutions they visited. 86 Click for larger view Fig 17. Howard Auditorium, Oral Roberts University, architect Frank Wallace, 1972. (Source: Photograph by Margaret M. Grubiak.) The futuristic architecture of Oral Roberts University was also a product of its regional context.

Tulsa proved fertile ground for experimentation in art deco and modern architecture. In 1968, Roberts and his wife joined the Boston Avenue Methodist Church in Tulsa, an important art deco church designed by Oklahoma architect Bruce Goff in 1926. In Bartlesville, Oklahoma, some fifty miles north of Tulsa, was another key architectural landmark: Wright’s Price Tower (1952–56), one of his only realized tall buildings and part of his imagined Broadacre City, a proposed plan for the development of the United States. In downtown Tulsa in 1975, Yamasaki designed the skyscraper One Williams Center (now BOK Tower), though this was nearly a decade after Wallace’s Prayer Tower for Oral Roberts University influenced by Yamasaki’s U.S. Science Pavilion for the Seattle fair. The context of the Midwest freed Roberts from the Colonial Revival style that dominated conservative Christian colleges on the East Coast, including Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University (founded 1971), Pat Robertson’s Regent University (founded 1978), and the more recent Patrick Henry College (founded 2000), all located in Virginia.

Unlike Falwell and Robertson, Roberts did not need to rely on architectural revivalism to express his religious and social conservatism; rather, the populuxe aesthetic aligned Roberts with the modern era and spoke to the realization of God’s great wealth. [End Page 408] Perhaps due to Wallace’s derivative designs, the university’s Christian identity, and its location in middle America, the Oral Roberts University campus was snubbed by the architectural press in its early years, though it was discussed often in profiles of Roberts himself. When the campus did receive attention from critics, they framed its architecture as rather pedestrian. The 1978 assessment published in Progressive Architecture claimed that Oral Roberts University represented “a kind of popular understanding of modern architecture” tinged with an idea of luxury: The aesthetic reflects that of a new middle class whose aspirations are toward elegance—an elegance that is somewhat standardized and perhaps a bit gaudy to ensure that the point not be missed. It is designed to be impressive, in other words.

Yet the impressiveness is as comfortably predictable as one would expect in a good motel; it is slightly overpriced “Ramada-mentality.” Progressive Architecture also stated that this version of modernism “lost something along the way” as it “trickled down … from the professional taste elite to the larger audience.” Nonetheless the campus became a highly successful marketing tool appealing to students from a mostly white, Protestant middle class. 87 The suburban campus of elegant, modern architecture, which was “a reinforcing symbol of the taste of its users,” made them feel at home. 88 This appeal to modernism and luxury is captured in the idea of “populuxe” coined by Hine in 1986.

In the book of the same name, Hine explored the decade between 1954 and 1964 that relished consuming on a mass scale the new and the luxurious in a material “golden age.” 89 Hine contends that populuxe designs were “symbols of achievement, affirmations that their owners had achieved a life of convenience and prosperity that their parents could have only dreamed of.” Populuxe design was popular taste, not academic or high-minded taste sanctioned by the Museum of Modern Art and other artistic and architectural elites. Rather, it strayed toward the fantastic, as in the hotel designs of Morris Lapidus in Florida. “People wanted to be known for their good taste,” Hine wrote, “but they also wanted to have great showy things that demonstrated that they had arrived.” 90 The image of Oral Roberts University was crafted to show that Roberts and his followers had indeed arrived. At the time of the school’s opening, Roberts was moving from the cultural fringe as a suspect faith healer into the American mainstream with an immensely popular television ministry [End Page 409] and a brand new university.

One profile of Roberts noted he had become a respected Tulsa citizen with a country club membership, expensive suits, and a Cadillac—a far cry from his impoverished upbringing. 91 The architecture he and Wallace created for Oral Roberts University was of a piece with this idea of social arrival. The architectural image of the campus, evocative of middle-class taste, was the material manifestation of what Roberts’s electronic ministry promised: good health and great wealth with a true faith in Jesus Christ. Conclusion The architecture of Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Oklahoma, reified the American electronic church of the 1960s and 1970s. It crafted a futuristic and luxurious image that spoke to technological optimism and material wealth embedded within the American evangelical tradition. Roberts created an institution that made real what was otherwise a disembodied experience of church over the airways, offering a pilgrimage point for the millions that his ministry reached. In 1969, a Kentucky steel mill worker and his wife drove to Tulsa specifically to visit the university.

A chance encounter with Roberts himself on the campus became “the thrill of their vacation.” 92 By 1970, more than 100,000 people visited Oral Roberts University annually, making it the most visited tourist site in Tulsa. 93 Influenced by the Seattle World’s Fair, Roberts created a permanent religious fair, one that showcased what belief in Christ could mean. Oral Roberts conceived of his university with technology at the forefront. Technology was a key component in the education of Oral Roberts University students—from the computers that played their professors’ lectures to the microwave ovens that warmed their food—and future evangelists here were trained in the most modern radio and television tools. The campus also served as sound stage for the very production of Robert’s radio and television programs. Understanding Oral Roberts University means understanding that it was, and is, more than our traditional conception of a university. It is the realization of Roberts’s entire ministry, one invested heavily in the American electronic church. [End Page 410] Margaret M. Grubiak Margaret M.

Grubiak is associate professor of architectural history at Villanova University and author of White Elephants on Campus: The Decline of the University Chapel in America, 1920–1960 (2014). She wishes to thank the anonymous reviewers and Barbara Hahn for helping to shape this article, as well as the Tulsa City-County Library for its generous assistance and Oral Roberts University for permission to use images. Bibliography Armstrong, Ben. The Electronic Church. New York: Thomas Nelson, 1979. Balmer, Randall. Blessed Assurance: A History of Evangelicalism in America. Boston: Beacon Press, 1999. Barfoot, Chas. H. Aimee Semple McPherson and the Making of Modern Pentecostalism 1890–1926. London: Equinox Publishing, 2011. Berger, Knute. Space Needle: The Spirit of Seattle. Seattle: Documentary Media, 2012. Bowler, Kate. Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. Briggs, Kenneth A.

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Father Coughlin: The Tumultuous Life of the Priest of the Little Flower. Boston: Little, Brown, 1973. “‘States Medley’ from Oral Roberts ‘Harvest Festival,’ 1973.” YouTube video, 5:18. Posted by lhelmle, 30 August 2010. (accessed 13 June 2014). Sutton, Matthew Avery. Aimee Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007. “The Way We Weren’t.” Perihelion. Oral Roberts University yearbook, 1976, 86–87. van Dyne, Larry. “God and Man at Oral Roberts.” Chronicle of Higher Education, 8 December 1975, 3–4. Williams, Daniel K. God’s Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. [End Page 413] Footnotes

Question: In which decade was the Oral Roberts University founded at Tulsa?
Answer: 1960s